3 Count: Privacy Please

Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

Note: Due to my hiatus caused by Hurricane Isaac, I have no real means of catching up on all of the previous stories. Instead, I’ll use this week’s podcast to do that, which you can find here. In the meantime, I’ll resume covering stories from the past 24 hours with this column.

1: Oracle Must Pay Google $1 Million in Legal Fees

First off today, software giant Oracle must pay Google $1 million in legal fees following Google’s win in a patent and copyright lawsuit. Oracle had sued Google alleging that the JAVA version used in the Android mobile operating system violated Oracle’s patents and copyrights. Oracle, which acquired JAVA from SUN in an acquisition, had sought up to $6 billion in damages but lost at trial. Oracle then tried to avoid paying Google’s legal fees saying that the trial was a “landmark issue” but the judge again disagreed, noting that the copyright issues, the ones considered to be more “landmark” in nature, were not raised until later in the case. Google had sought $4 million in legal fees but the judge reduced that to $1 million. Oracle is still planning on appealing the jury verdict.

2: Computer Hackers Target Cambodia

Next up today, following the arrest of Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg in its country, hackers claiming to be from an organization called NullCrew have attacked government sites in the country. Warg was one of the four founders of The Pirate Bay convicted criminal copyright infringement and sentenced to one year in prison. However, Warg was not present at any of the appeals, citing medical issues, and never returned to begin his sentence. Cambodian authorities arrested him and said that they would deport him, though not necessarily to Sweden. Warg was scheduled to begin his sentence earlier this year.

3: Report: If You’ve Downloaded a Popular Movie via BitTorrent, You’re Probably Being Watched

Finally today, a new report by a group of computer scientists at the University of Birmingham, UK finds that, odds are, if you’ve downloaded a popular movie or album via Bittorrent, your information likely is sitting in a database somewhere. The team identified some 1,139 IP addresses that they believed were monitoring user activity on behalf of copyright holders, government officials and others and studied the types of content they were watching. The team found that popular works were almost constantly watched while more obscure ones largely escaped monitoring. However, even casual file sharers, so long as they downloaded popular works, were likely being tracked by at least one agency or another.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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Tune in every Wednesday evening at 5 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

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